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Tuesday, October 18, 2016

October 18, 2016 from the Chronicle of Higher Ed [Originally from the Pittsburgh Post]

Faculty members in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education plan to go on strike Wednesday morning if contract negotiations do not yield a new contract,thePittsburgh Post-Gazettereports.

System officials and union representatives continued their talks Monday evening in order to avert a strike. An embargo on the negotiations has kept students, staff members, and the public in the dark, but an agreement seems possible. The union signaled in a statement on Friday that it would stay at the table past Sunday if there was progress.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Texas’campus-carry lawhas had well-publicized effects on the state’s public colleges: A handful of professors have resigned in protest, thousands of dollars have been spent on educational materials, and mobs of students havestrapped dildos to their backpacksin protest.

But in the conversation about the effects of the law, one campus constituency has been largely overlooked: graduate students. At the University of Texas at Austin, that’s changed, as a small handful of graduate students have started holding office hours in a bar — admittedly, a softer kind of protest.

Friday, October 7, 2016

But numbers also show some are centralizing services, which could save money

The Hechinger Report

Post-it notes stick to the few remaining photos hanging on the walls of the University of Maine System offices, in a grand brick, renovated onetime W.T. Grant department store built in 1948.

The notes are instructions for the movers, since the pictures and everything else are in the midst of being packed up and divided among the system’s seven campuses.

Only 20 people work here now, down from a peak of 120, and the rest will soon be gone, too, following their colleagues and fanning out to the campuses. Disassembled cubicles and crates of documents are piled in the corners of the 36,000-square-foot space, and light shines from the doors of the few lonely offices still occupied. All of the agency’s three floors in the building, in a quiet part of town near a statue of Bangor native hero and Abraham Lincoln’s first-term vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, have been put up for sale.